Hey @cmccormack thanks for the hit back. Um. Not really an issue as much as looking to get a better understanding when it comes to React. HTML, CSS, JS makes sense to me because I create a file and the browser displays it. I get from a high level view that these Frameworks and Libraries need “something” to convert (I guess bundle is the word) the “stuff” into a those basic elements (HTML CSS JS) so the browser can display it. My question, or what I am trying to figure out, is what is Webpack, Babel, etc. What should we be using to create a React App so it will display correctly? Seems like we should just do the npm create-react-app or whatever the code is as that appears that it does everything I am asking about, but can that be deployed on a website? I realize that someone is going to tell me to read. I am, and watching videos. The reason I am asking is because I see people use WebPack, Babel, maybe WebPack and Babel, Browsify (or something like that)…. I am just trying to get an idea of what is going on in simple terms and not just follow along with someone who does it one way, another does it a different way and not realize they may be just doing the same thing but with different “helpers”

@bgq007 the only thing that actually gets deployed is the JS bundle and html + assets. Tools like webpack take your JS files, use tools like babel to transpile/polyfill, and combine all the stuff you have local using npm or whatever into a single (or multiple if using code splitting) JS bundle files. They can also do quite a bit more than that but this is just a quick summary

I personally do not use CRA but many people do and seem to like it just fine. I used it a few times to get used to React but now use my own custom configs. up to each person how they want to do it. Tools like parcel can take some of the complication out as well, and we'll probably see more tools like this in the future that bring frontend dev back to something more familiar

yeah webpack and babel are deeper down but they are included. if you follow the scripts from the root package.json you can find it in the node_modules